Building Unique Partnerships for the WQIP: A collaboration between UWM, MMSD, and Sweet Water
When UWM professor Dr. Nancy Frank approached Sweet Water and MMSD about her students developing WQIP public outreach, the decision was a no-brainer. Sweet Water’s primary mission is to bring diverse partners together to protect and restore the Greater Milwaukee Watersheds, and the WQIP (the Water Quality Improvement Plan) presents a path for doing just that. Teaming up with the region’s future urban and regional planners and freshwater researchers to help develop public education about this plan was a great opportunity for taking the first steps toward implementation.
Nancy, interim dean of UWM’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning, has a long history with Sweet Water. She served as board chair early in Sweet Water’s history and rejoined the board in fall 2019. According to Nancy, “the WQIP is inherently complicated and touches upon many of the topics I cover in my Water Resources Planning course,” including green infrastructure, collaboration, co-benefits, and formal and informal water quality trading. In addition, learning how to communicate complex ideas to stakeholders is a key skill that both her planning and freshwater students need to develop.
The WQIP aims to accelerate improvement of water quality in the Greater Milwaukee Watersheds. To this end, the WQIP presents a framework for coordinating the actions of many stakeholders upon a central goal of improving water quality and delisting impaired streams in a targeted area.
One of the trickiest parts of coordination is ensuring the buy-in of stakeholders whose primary focus is likely not on improving water quality, such as businesses, developers or community organizations. The success of integrated watershed management is directly related to the number and scale of projects that become connected, and recruiting people and organizations to become involved requires tailored messages to different types of stakeholders. Nancy’s Water Resources Planning class is set up to grapple with complex concepts like these, so helping Sweet Water identify key messages needed to recruit stakeholders was a perfect real-world project for the class to tackle.
The class chose to target three different stakeholder groups: developers, municipalities, and schools. Over the course of the semester, the class developed communication mechanisms for explaining the relevancy of integrated watershed management to each of these groups. But first, the students needed to fully understand the goals and approaches of the WQIP. Members of the WQIP team, including Susan Coyle, senior project manager at MMSD, Jake Fincher, interim director at Sweet Water, Kristin Schoenecker, watershed coordination manager at Sweet Water, and Pete Hill, a contractor with Sweet Water, attended the class on a few occasions to explain the WQIP, answer the students’ questions, and check in on the development of the students’ projects.
These projects included brochures for developers and municipalities and an event for teachers, students, and parents to bring information to them that would encourage them to be part of collaborative water quality projects. While the primary goal of the WQIP is the improvement of water quality, integrated watershed management can achieve cost savings, improved amenities for communities, and other co-benefits. These primary and co-benefits help each of these groups to meet their own goals. The students needed to understand their stakeholders’ goals and identify how the WQIP can meet these goals in addition to the goals of the watershed.
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A special thanks to the following individuals for providing their expertise:
Andy Holschbach, Village of Bayside
Barbara Richards, Reflo
Brandon Koltz, Water & Environmental Consulting LLC
Brian Depies, SEH Inc.
Pete Reynolds, Learn Deep
John Ferris, GZA
John Siepmann, Siepmann Realty Corporation
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In addition to working with the WQIP team, members of a WQIP stakeholder advisory work group came to the midterm review and provided direct feedback to students to improve their projects. This WQIP work group met four times in the summer and fall of 2019 to help develop the WQIP recommendations and were uniquely prepared to assist students in this project. For example, to communicate with developers, the stakeholders stressed the importance of addressing the potential of collaborative efforts under the WQIP to improve the return on investment. Green infrastructure increases development value by improving aesthetics and opening opportunities for funding not available when using only gray infrastructure.
In communicating with municipalities, the class first had to understand that municipal representatives come from a variety of departments, bringing a varying level of understanding of the technical side of integrated watershed management. Municipalities also benefit from implementing the WQIP framework in different ways depending on if they are a more rural or urban community. Therefore, the class developed a brochure that explained technical concepts using easily understandable graphics that could be modified depending on the location of the community. Another important concept that the class made sure to mention was the ability of an integrated watershed management approach to help the municipality achieve permit compliance.
The group developing communication about the WQIP for schools found that they had one of the more challenging assignments. The diversity of audiences (school administrators, teachers, students, parents) increased the complexity of communication. The class identified that a water quality fair at the school could connect teachers, students, and parents with activities and opportunities to support community water quality goals. Engaging this group plays a major role in ensuring the buy-in of the community at large, so connecting schools to the work of NGOs, the private sector, and municipalities is a major educational opportunity.
Nancy found that the projects and collaboration with the WQIP team exceeded her original expectations for the course. "Kristin, Susan, Jake, and Pete were great partners," Nancy said, "devoting much more time working directly with students than I had anticipated." The opportunity for students to hear directly from the authors of the WQIP throughout the semester about how their work achieved the communication goals of the WQIP team was especially valuable. In addition, the students were diligent in ensuring that their deliverables communicated the collaborative approach of the WQIP and how to communicate the win-win objectives of the WQIPs multi-stakeholder partnerships. Says Nancy, "I am really proud of what the students produced and what they learned."
Thanks to all of the students who worked so hard on this project! Here’s what some of these students had to say about this project.
On Sweet Water and MMSD’s side, the collaboration was just as valuable. Susan said, “This activity helped us to see the WQIP through different eyes. The WQIP is a complicated document because it deals with the complicated topic of Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs) and how the watershed stakeholders can collaborate to meet them. Working with Nancy’s students helped us to parse out the pieces of the WQIP that were relevant to various stakeholders in a clear, concise manner. Because the students were so open to constructive criticism, adapting their products throughout the semester, their work may become a component of our WQIP outreach efforts.”
Sweet Water thanks everyone involved in this project for being great partners! As the WQIP is implemented, this project will serve as a model for the commitment, adaptability, and creativity needed to see successful integrated watershed management used in the Greater Milwaukee Watershed.
Interested in seeing the students’ final projects? Check out a few samples of the materials that they developed!
